After dinner and a bottle of the local wine in the deserted dining-room, he felt excited, without knowing why, until he began thinking of the garden. He had passed the girl in the lobby before supper and this time she had looked at him and approved of him, but it kept worrying him: Why? When I could have had a good share of pretty women of my time for the asking, why start that now? With a wraith, with a fragment of my desire? Why? His imagination pushed ahead — the old asceticism, the actual unfamiliarity, triumphed. […] To belittle all these years with something cheap and easy?
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The Night
